Sex and stickiness (page 1 of 2)

The phenomenon is not unique to AME Info. For over a year, the BBC's story about a Sudanese man forced to marry a goat has regularly appeared in the site's most emailed stories.

Yahoo! Most Emailed stories is frequently topped by quirky sex-related news, and Yahoo!'s Most Viewed news pictures are generally 30% cute animals, 70% models in bikinis.

AME Info certainly doesn't court sex-related attention (though we have a casual bet going as to whether this article will make the day's most popular list). When we first introduced our most read story lists, the suggested title was "Today's Hot Stories", as the articles linked were the ones getting the most clicks and generating the most buzz.

Hot and sticky

But it was felt that "hot" was too sexy a term for a business information website. So instead the category became: "Today's Top Stories" - even though they aren't necessarily the top stories in terms of importance or editorial judgement.


Sex is admittedly very "sticky" in terms of web content. It not only gets people onto sites, it keeps them there. It brings them back. No wonder that sex is considered such a driver of new technology. As Peter Johnson notes in his essay "Why Not to Censor the Internet":

"Throughout the history of new media, from vernacular speech to movable type, to photography, to paperback books, to videotape, to cable and pay-TV, to "900" phone lines, to the French Minitel, to the Internet, to CD-ROMs and laser discs, pornography has shown technology the way."

Building sticky websites

But this isn't much help in much of the Arab world. Regional sites can't rely on sex and pornography to encourage internet and technology use, because these types of content are banned in most countries. In fact just researching this article was difficult, because the UAE blocked my attempts to Google "porn drives internet" and "internet porn statistics". I was forced to bypass the proxy to get the information I needed.

So how can one make a website sticky and sexy in a non-sexual way? Three ways. First interactivity: with features such as polls, forums and commenting. One of the reasons YouTube is so phenomenally popular is the sense of audience that its comment feature generates. Each video becomes a watercooler moment, with hundreds of users sharing their opinions, and asking and answering questions.

Photo-sharing site Flickr is as much about social networking as holiday snaps. Blogger is as much about heated discussions between readers as the wit and wisdom (or angst and anger) of the actual blog author. And give users a chance to pass on and share content on your website with "email this" links or the use of Technorati, Digg or Del.icio.us tags.

The power of the new

Secondly, currency: not in the sense of money but in the sense of always having fresh, up-to-date content. In the early days of the internet this was enormously labour intensive; now with custom feeds and third party add-ons such as stock-tickers and weather information it can be entirely automated.

The best thing is that you can create a news feed to exactly suit your site's target audience.